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JAMES McPARLAND

When the Pinkerton Detective
Agency was contracted by the state of Idaho to conduct an investigation
into the Steunenberg assassination it sent to Boise the most famous detective
in the land, James P. McParland. McParland had made his reputation thirty
years earlier in the anthracite coalfields of Pennsylvania working undercover
to expose a murderous gang of Irish-American thugs known as the Molly Maguires. Working
for $12 a week, knowing he faced certain death if exposed, McParland frequented
the card rooms and bars where Mollies were rumored to meet until we earned
the trust of his targets and became a member of their secret society. When
suspicions arose that McParland was an informer, he fled, dashing across
frozen fields ahead of a gang of tomahawk-wielding toughs. McParland testified
in nine Molly trials, helping to convict and execute twenty members, including
most of the leadership, of the secret society responsible for so much Pennsylvania
terror. McParland's Molly exploits earned him a cameo in Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle's The Valley of Fear, where he and Sherlock Holmes have an
encounter.

McParland specialty with the Pinkertons was labor unrest, making
McParland, by then 62 and manager of Pinkerton's western operations, an
obvious choice to head the Steunenberg investigation. Arriving in Boise
in January of 1906, the portly master detective spent five hours going
over details of the case with Idaho's Governor Gooding. He announced
his suspicion that Orchard, already captured, was "the tool of others,"
and requested that he be transferred from the jail in Caldwell to the state
penitentiary in Boise so as to better extract a confession. The confession
was soon in his hands after he suggested to Orchard that cooperation would
likely lead to more lenient treatment. McParland then focused his attention
on arranging the hasty arrests of the inner circle of the WFM implicated
by Orchard in the Steunenberg assassination. McParland also arranged the
special train that would carry the three inner circle members to Idaho.
Those missions accomplished, McParland divided time between trying to round
up potential witnesses, assembling incriminating evidence, leaking information
that would tarnish the reputations of the defendants and their attorneys,
checking out potential jurors, and orchestrating the prosecution effort.
Although James Hawley announced in his opening statement for the prosecution
that James McParland, "the terror of evildoers throughout the west,"
would be a witness, he was never called.

McParland was born in Ireland in 1843. He remained in Ireland and
England for 26 years, working as a stock clerk, a fieldhand, a circus barker,
and a chemical plant worker before taking a ship from Liverpool to New
York in 1867. McParland settled in Chicago, where he opened a liquor store.
When the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 destroyed his business, he took a job
with the Pinkertons and began his colorful career as a detective.